


Desert Taxi (possibly miraculous)

by Ilyas



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:38:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilyas/pseuds/Ilyas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A taxi appeared in the distance, she says.  Orange and beige, like every other, just appeared out of the desert.  There was no road in that direction, but there it was, throwing up a cloud of dust.  Nisreen was praying and looked up from sujood and thought it was a miracle, then a mirage.  She and Majda stood shading their eyes and watching it approach.  Maybe the heat was getting to them.  But it got closer and closer and finally pulled up next to the battered Toyota and stopped.  Nisreen watched as the driver got out.  He was a big guy in a black thobe.  He asked how he could help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

My co-worker and two of her friends went into the desert during one of the long hot boring Fridays of Ramadan. They took their Toyota sedan through wadis like it was a four by four. It’s the clearance, she says. Those little cars have nearly as much clearance as a small truck. She wanted to take pictures of some plant, don’t ask me to remember the name, I’m no good with them. She climbed up a rocky slope where the car couldn’t go, but it was farther than it looked. The rubber soles of her sandals melted on the rocks and she slipped and fell and hit her head. Out there in the desert, halfway up a hill built of sharp rocks the size of tyres or bigger.

My coworker’s fingers clatter on the keys. She can write copy and talk about something completely different at the same time, hardly slowing down. I can’t even proofread when someone’s talking, which is difficult because we share a cubicle and she talks a lot. The job is boring. The news here reads like the King’s kindergarten report card. He sent a cable today and got a response! Well done sir, clap clap.

“So what happened?” I ask.

Her friends sitting in the car with the AC saw her fall and then not move and climbed up the hill after her. Or tried to. One was wearing heels and didn’t even make it to the hill and the other was unable to move my coworker, Amal, on her own. And what if she had a broken neck? It was blazing hot out and they hadn’t brought much water and they couldn’t just leave her there, and the girl in heels, Majda, couldn’t drive standard. The car was Amal and Nisreen’s desert car, unlicensed, lacking a sunroof, one back door held shut with wire. It was a desert race car they bought off some village boys.

“So what did they do?” I ask. Amal enjoys building up the suspense.

Nisreen had a panic attack standing on sharp rocks in the sun watching Amal bleed, and then she took off her scarf and held it to Amal’s head for a while before sliding back down the hill on her butt – she had a better job and wore leather sandals, traded shoes with Majda, gave Majda the rest of the water, and bullied her up the slope in her three hundred dinar dress to sit with Amal while Nisreen went to get help. Except the car broke down within sight of the hill. Overheated, steam everywhere.

Clackety clack clack clatter. “How are you not dead?” I say. I’m surprised I haven’t heard the story before. It must have been recent. “When did this happen?”

Amal finally gives in.

A taxi appeared in the distance, she says. Orange and beige, like every other, just appeared out of the desert. There was no road in that direction, but there it was, throwing up a cloud of dust. Nisreen was praying and looked up from sujood and thought it was a miracle, then a mirage. She and Majda stood shading their eyes and watching it approach. Maybe the heat was getting to them. But it got closer and closer and finally pulled up next to the Toyota and stopped. Nisreen watched as the driver got out.  He was a big guy wearing a black thobe.  He asked how he could help.

He carried Amal down off the hill without much difficulty and laid her in the back seat of his car with the AC blasting. The other women sat in the front seat drinking lukewarm bottled water out of his trunk and listening to the radio while the edges of their vision flattened out and he fixed their car. Somehow. Nisreen didn’t know how he did it and Majda refused to know anything about cars so as to avoid helping fix the desert car.

Evening was falling and the taxi driver opened the back door of the car where Amal was laying groggy and mumbling occasionally. He spoke to her gently and shone a light in her eyes and poured some clear liquid out of a bottle into his palm and then sprinkled it on her face. Her eyes popped open fully, and now Amal remembers this part. It smelled like roses, sharp and sweet and a little spoiled. Her head hurt something awful and she still did not know who he was or what he was doing, but she knew she had been out in the desert with her friends.

“And then?”

They thanked him and he drove off, back into the desert, and they drove home. She was back at work on Sunday, with a headache, which she told her mother must have been from the heat. But she was fine. Nisreen had prayed and just then Allah had sent them a miracle. She should have died that day, and she never saw a doctor, out of gratitude. She had faith that she would be alright.

That is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a while. “Well, alhumdulillah,” I say. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

“I hear stories sometimes about people breaking down on the desert roads, and this taxi driver appears out of the desert to help. It’s like it’s always this one guy. He must be an angel.”

“Think he’s married?” I ask. I don’t really feel it, but those are the sorts of things you say. It’s expected. It passes the time.

“No, an _actual_ angel,” she says. “Besides, what an unsteady job. I wouldn’t want to be married to someone who was always running off into the desert at all hours to help dumb tourists who wanted to see the Big Empty and forgot it was big and empty and has no concept of mercy. What’ll happen when we have kids and he’s never around?”

* * *

 

Abdo’s father was one of those, never around, never answered his phone. Which was just as well. When he wasn’t out with his friends, he was possessive, always had to be the centre of attention, and bad in bed. Until I went back to my mother’s house and then came here, and now he always picks up before the third ring.

“How is he,” I say, and Abdo’s father launches into a spiel about tests. “You can’t detect brain cancer on a blood test,” I say. “Well whatever, you can’t – _do_ they think it’s leukemia?” I don’t want to give him any more information he doesn’t have already. “What did Dr. K say?. Decreased red blood cells. Really. Rahim, that’s anemia, not leukemia. Aha. Put mama on the phone. No, I can’t send more yet, I sent everything I could spare when I got paid. No I can’t ask for an advance, that’s a stupid idea and they wouldn’t give me one. This can’t be costing that much if they don’t know what’s wrong with him yet, blood tests don’t cost that much.”

Rahim claims he’s had to take time off work to take care of Abdo, which I don’t believe for a minute. My mother would take care of him, if anyone, or my sister. Rahim probably just lost his job again and is milking me for money with a lie about Abdo being sick. Probably. It’s the possibility that he’s not lying that worries me, because mama said Abdo’d been sick a lot that year and while it’s as much brain cancer as my ass is whipped cream, I don’t really know much about anemia or leukemia. But supposedly nobody else is ever around when I talk to Rahim and if I hang up and dial again I have to use a whole other phone card and they’re expensive.

I will call Mama tomorrow.

* * *

 

My boss asks me to write something about the new law.

“Which new law?” There are always plenty under development.

“Just that new law,” he says, “you know,” and gives me the “you are dismissed” look.

I don’t move. “There’s more than one under development, did you have a particular one in mind?”

“There’s only one that matters, and it’s going to be huge.” He looks down at his desk, squares some papers, turns to his computer and starts clicking on folders.

I leave before he accuses me of trying to make him do my job for me.

My boss never tells me what he wants, he just pulls a Captain Picard but instead of ‘make it so’ he says ‘you may go’, and unlike Picard he never says exactly what he wants done. He expects me to just know, and then aims his disappointment at me when I get it wrong and blames me for not producing. I had been trying to coax and prod him into giving me instructions, but he thinks he’s communicating and I can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.  He doesn’t pay me nearly enough for this. I’m not even supposed to be a staff writer, I was hired as office help and I’m still officially office help, my work visa has never been switched over and I don’t know why. So I still make an office assistant’s salary even though I’m writing and copy editing and have to share a cubicle with Amal, who talks all day.

It could be so much worse. He could grope me, or hit me, or chain smoke in the office and never give me days off. I have lived through that, and other people in this country are currently living through that, and I realise it could be worse but that doesn’t make my frustration any less. I sit at my desk and wish I could pace. I worry that I am doing this assignment all wrong – not that I actually know what the assignment is – and will be put on report. I eat an antacid and try not to think about how much I feel like vomiting.

My coworker and I sit in our dim little cubicle and try to guess what he might have meant. We might as well use a Ouija board, but Amal is a bit too religious to resort to that. I’m not, but I’m also not superstitious. We decide it’s probably the new employment law, because it will cause the most stir. Probably. I spend Tuesday phoning employment committee members and sitting in the waiting rooms of under-secretaries at the Ministry of Manpower and whip up an article with very little substance, because guess what, the law isn’t final and they don’t want to tell me anything. One of Amal’s cousins who works in the ministry tells me she heard it’s something to do with visas for foreign workers, and gives me a sympathetic look. The dread hits me when I hear the word visa and I ask her for the key to the washroom.

I sit down in my boss’ office at 8 am on Wednesday with the article proof and it turns out he wanted something on the new marriage law, which neither me nor my coworker had heard about because nothing had been made public yet. I spend Wednesday back at ministries and Thursday I interview a few people who were hoping to marry and might have the chance now and submit the article at 1 pm on Thursday. I hope it will run in the Saturday edition and nobody at _The Nation_ had more wasta and got more information than I did.

* * *

 

I go home and call my mother. Her blood sugar is too high and she wants to make sure I’m eating and praises God a lot. So do I, for her sake. She says Abdo has had colds a lot but Rahim hasn’t said anything about any tests. The weasel is lying, I know it, but I can’t prove it.

I lay on my mattress on the floor of my shared room and listen to the fan slapping the hot air. I wish I could go back and make sure Abdo is alright, and take care of him, but I can’t. I have a job to do and my mother’s medication and son’s school to pay for. I cry in the dark and hope my roommate doesn’t notice. I don’t pray. There is nobody listening.

* * *

 

On Friday, my day off, it is forty degrees Celcius at six-thirty in the morning. I pick the scattered clothes up off the floor of my room, stuff the moist bundle into the laundry bag, straighten my sheet, lean the mattress up against the wall. Leave the place presentable.

I fill a bottle with tepid water from the jug and put it in my purse with a bruised mango for breakfast. I didn’t wake up in time for suhoor, but I don’t really fast anymore, I just forget to eat. I don’t do it out of belief, I just either feel ill or can’t be bothered to feed myself. I don’t feel like I deserve food.

And then I start walking towards the mountains. I haven’t been this way since last fall, back when I used to go on walks, back when I still had olives from home to take with me for lunch with bread.

There is a long, familiar gravel plain dotted with shrubs between the city and the mountains. It is hard to tell how far away the mountains are, but I have never been to them, even in my hiking days. They are a long way away, but the desert calls to me again, on this long hot hopeless summer day. It is big and empty and so am I.

* * *

 

Amal and her friends had been in the foothills probably, so that is where I am headed.

I don’t make it as far as the mountains. Even with water and a sugary mango, I weak before the foothills even seem any closer. The sun blazes and the air over the desert is shimmery, the sands in the distance like a mirror. Like the sea. We are so close to the sea that the humidity is high, which nourishes the scrubby little plants Amal likes but makes the heat even harder to bear. It is weird, to be in the desert with a parched mouth, breathing air that is as thick and hot as soup but doesn’t quench the thirst. Just walking is hard, like wading in shallow water. A day at the beach, in the desert. I laugh.

My heart is beating too fast and hard and my head throbs along in time with it. I keep slogging through the sand. My vision is going silver around the edges. I’m just going to kneel, for a while, until my vision clears. It does not clear, but it seems more bearable down here, and I make it nearly into the shade of a skinny little acacia tree before I collapse. I drag myself into the shade and hug the trunk of the olive tree.

There are blessings in olive trees. I am in the little garden around my mother’s house, sitting in the shade on a evening, and Abdo is playing with his cars under the olive trees. My mother is whacking the branches with a broom. It’s raining olives, but I don’t care. They patter down around me.

Footsteps crunch on the shore, and I am floating. I reach for the trunk of the olive tree so the sea doesn’t carry me away. My eyes flutter open and then fall shut again. I am not floating, I am lifted. There is a hard bicep against my cheek, like a tree trunk. I sink under the surface of the sea, hot salty waves washing over me and gently rocking me to sleep.

I am laying down, cheek pressed against cold slick beige vinyl. Cold dry air is blowing on my other cheek and chilling my sweaty clothes, and I miss the ocean. A door opens, letting in a draft of hot air, like opening a toaster oven. Someone is behind me, and something hot and wet splatters my face. It smells sweet and oily and slightly rotten. Like crude country rosewater in a house with no refrigerator. Like home, like my grandmother on Great Friday. “Taxi diver,” I say. My mouth is too dry to trill an R. I’m in Nisreen’s miraculous taxi, maybe. Maybe I’m dead. I feel hot and dry as a mummy.

“Can you sit up?” Asks a womanly voice. I’m pushed up and sit lolling against the car door while I drink from a bottle of cool water. A huge person is crouched on the seat next to me, tipping water into my mouth a bit at a time and holding my head steady. Their voice is deep and firm and gentle, but he is large and muscled. I watch the driver as I drink. He is wearing a man’s wrap skirt and shirt, slightly foreign. She is baked the red colour of someone who spends a lot of time in the sun. Her hand wrapped around the bottle is larger than the bottle, but his black hair threaded with grey is braided and the braid lying on his breast.

They could be male or female, neither or both at once or shifting. I am not at all sure of their gender, but this person saved my life and I’m not going to ask them rude questions.

Besides, I feel terrible. The ocean was so warm and it was so nice to be home again, but I just than that, everything was very nearly over. I start to cry, and turn my head away from the water bottle. I cover my face.

The taxi driver backs up and sits down on the seat next to me. They close the door all the way to keep the cold air in. “You’re very lucky. I nearly didn’t get here in time.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, and choke.

“Feeling a little better now?”

“Yes.” I’m not really. I haven’t felt this bad since I left Rahim. Feeling nothing was better.

“What’s bothering you so much that you walked into the desert alone in July and lay down? You can tell me.”

“Everything.” I start to sob, and I tell the driver everything. My boss and too-small salary and my cockroach-ridden expensive room and my stupid still-husband. My sick mother, my father’s death. Abdo. “It all seems so trivial when I say it, except for Abdo. I don’t know why I’m crying. Other people have it so much worse. I’m sorry for causing you trouble.”

The taxi driver hugs me in answer and if they’re a man then I don’t care. They’re big and warm and strong and their car is cool and clean and quiet and I didn’t realise before how alone I felt. I didn’t think I needed anyone else, but maybe I do.

“You don’t have to always think about other people. It’s good to care, but their problems don’t do anything to change your problems. Your problems don’t sound trivial to me, they sound like a lot of worry and sadness for one person to carry alone.”

I nod. It is.

“You don’t have to carry everything alone all of the time. There must be someone around you you can talk to. You share a room, right. Talk to your roommate.”

I have never really talked to my roommate. I know her name and I know she’s a nursing assistant but I hardly know _her_. “I guess I could.” It seems weird to start now, but this person saved my life and I don’t want to seem ungrateful. “I will try.” I wipe my face on my sleeve. “Did you help three girls in a car last Friday? One of them fell on the rocks. Amal, and Nisreen, and Majda.”

“Yes, that was me. Was that why you walked out into the desert? A bump on the head is an easier problem to fix than yours. I will do what I can, but I can’t make all your problems go away.”

“I wanted help for my son, really, not for me. For Abdo. I don’t know whether he’s sick or not, but he’s never been a strong kid. I’m afraid Rahim isn’t entirely lying. Is it the water, is that how you do it?”

“The rosewater? It’s good rosewater, mixed with zamzam. It’s used in India for eye problems. It’s used to wash the kaabah. There is benefit in it.”

“It healed Amal, she says. She could have died out here, but she came out with only a headache.”

“And probably a case of heat exhaustion. But I can only help you, the person who came to me. My power is not mine, and it’s not really something I can control.”

“Oh.”

“I will do what I can. I can pray for him, but anyone can do that.”

“Well, thank you for the thought.” I don’t want prayer, I want action. My mother has been praying for Abdo since before he was born and it hasn’t saved him. “Where do you get the rosewater?” If nothing else, it is worth a try, and it will make my mother feel better about Abdo’s colds.

“Ah, I can’t tell you that. The maker asked me not to, he’d be overrun if I did. But I don’t think it’s the water alone. I was tasked to help people when I can. That’s why I say my power is not my own. I committed a sin, and this is my penance. The only power I have is what I was given to do my job.” They pass me another bottle of water, nonchalantly. “Drink this too.”

Okay. This sounds a little nutty. “Tasked by whom?”

“By the Almighty.”

“Personally?”

“Well, not just me. My whole tribe.”

“What is your tribe name?” They tell me. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It was a very long time ago. I should take you back, it’s getting late.”

The taxi’s front and rear dashboard and the front seats and the ceiling are covered in sheepskin. A string of tiny amber prayer beads and a miniature Quran in a wooden case and a cluster of tags with prayers written on them in tiny script hang from the rearview mirror. There are not one but two tissue boxes below the rear window, covered in brown and gilt cases with edged gold beads. They match the Quran cover. The back window has a huge “ma shaa Allah” decal covering the whole thing. Amal did not mention any of that. At the rate I’m going, the driver must go through a lot of tissues.

I want to know what the driver’s sin is, and their gender, but I cannot ask those things. I ask if they have children. They do, but they are grown. How many? Eight. We fall silent.

“Barcelona or Real Madrid?” I ask.

“I haven’t watched football in a long time. I don’t even know who’s playing these days.”

“So you’ve never heard of Ronaldo?”

They laugh. “Everyone’s heard of Ronaldo.” We drive in silence for a while. “Football matches are one of the few times when nobody gets into trouble in the desert, usually. They save that for after the match.”

I think with regret of going back to work tomorrow and facing my boss. “What do you do,” I ask. “When you’re not saving idiots.”

“None of you are idiots,” the driver says. “I read, mostly.”

There is a paperback book on the fleecy dashboard. I read the title out loud. “The Last Unicorn.”

“You can find your people, if you are brave,” the driver says in English, and it sounds like they’re quoting. I start to cry and can’t hide it.

“Here.” They reach back and try to hand me the book. “Read it.”

“Oh no, thank you but I couldn’t.”

“You don’t read English so well?” They’re confused. I told them which newspaper I work for. It’s an English-language one.

“No, I do, it’s just, it’s your book.” I can’t take more from him. I’m already ashamed at myself for asking a random taxi driver for help with something so ordinary and small.

“I have others.” He holds it out.

I take it, and thank him, and hold it. It’s too dark to read now.

“Where are we going?” I ask. We’ve been driving for a long time it seems. “I can’t have walked this far.”

“Going along the wadis to where it’s shallower. Did you walk through them? The Corolla is a good car, but not even mine can go through those two wadis.”

The wadis were both steep, and there were eroding steps cut into the rock sides of one of them.

“I think the road is that way,” I say.

“It is, but I can only drive so far on the roads and I need to save it for when we get to town, to take you home.”

“You’re the driver,” I say. I am seriously starting to doubt how in touch with the laws of reality this person is, but they have been very kind.

He drops me off outside the housing compound, and I don’t care that he is a possibly-man who knows where I live. I am late getting back, and I have to pound on the gate and yell until the guard comes. I tell him I got lost and ignore the knowing look he gives me. He thinks I was out with a boyfriend. People will start to talk, but I don’t care. I’m just glad I’m alive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Trigger warning for a suicide attempt in this chapter]

The unicorn books sits unread beside my bed. It belongs to someone else, and someone I liked, so it gets a prime spot on the pile of work papers and agendas and shoeboxes full of junk, rather than just living on the floor. The first rains are at least a few months away, but you never know, there could be an unseasonable tropical storm or more likely I might drop a cup of tea.   I learned quickly to stack my stuff in order of importance, after the first time it rained and I woke up on a soaking wet mattress to find my phone had died a watery death on the floor next to my bed. It took me a few months to replace it.

On Sunday the Ministry of Manpower releases a notice that all visas for female foreign workers are being frozen. No new ones will be issued, and female workers currently in the country will not be allowed to change jobs.

“Unless they work for a ministry and someone really wants them,” Amal says. She is writing one of the stories about the new law, and I am trying to write another, but I don’t have her ability to talk and write at the same time. “I’m just waiting to see how long it takes work visas to be traded between people with political clout. Or just issued on the down-low.”

“Uh-huh.” That would be an actually interesting story, but it could never be published or even spoken about publically. “How can I spin this so it sounds like it will strengthen the economy?” This is not what I wanted to be doing with my half a journalism degree.

“Uhmm…it will prevent abuse of female workers. That’s a starting point.”

“It won’t though. It just means they can’t leave and their employers know it. If anything it will encourage abuse.” Like my boss knows he can do whatever he wants and I can’t leave, both because I need the money to send home and now because it’s illegal and impossible to change jobs. Now my work visa will never be switched over and I have no hope of making more money.

“It doesn’t matter. Truth has nothing to do with it. Everyone with any sense knows not to believe what the papers say, so don’t worry about it so much. Just write something that sounds good and take your paycheck and spend it on something nice for yourself.”

Amal can spend her money on herself, because her family mostly supports her. I don’t want to tell her that my son and my mother are sick and my father is dead and I send nearly my whole paycheck to my family, because I don’t want her to pity me and I don’t think she would really understand.

“It doesn’t have to be something big,” Amal says. “Buy a chocolate bar or some good coffee this month.” My mother would want that for me, but I have difficulty doing it for myself

“So how did your photos turn out?” I ask. I’ll finish the article later. I could use to be distracted right now.

“Ah, the ones of the tree I cracked my head and got stranded in the desert for weren’t any good.   But I got some good landscape shots, and some hilarious ones of Nisreen on the hood of the car. And one of Majda on the way back, holding her broken Manolos. Poor thing. I’ll bring some to show you, remind me.”

“Sure.”

“Or, you could come with us some time. It’s a lot of fun, and it won’t cost you anything. Hey, there’s an idea! You should come.”

“Well…” I am not sure I want to be in a car of noisy girls crashing around in the desert photographing scrub. I’m not sure I’d fit in there. Or that anyone other than Amal would understand my dialect.

“Oh come one! Have some fun for once. I know you don’t have any other plans, you never go anywhere. Don’t you get bored sitting in that room all the time?”

“Yeah a little, but driving around in the desert in Ramadan in July? It doesn’t really sound better than sitting at home with the fan on.” This is my opening to tell her that I went out into the desert and met her miraculous taxi driver, or a similar one, and that I think he’s a little nuts. It would make her happy, and she’s always telling me stories. I think of the folktale, “Toboqa is right for Shin” and the line, _shall I carry you or will you carry me?_ by talking to make the road shorter. I should carry her, for once, and talk to make the time pass.

“It’s hotter but it’s _less boring_ , that’s the main thing. And it really makes you appreciate water when iftar finally comes.”

“Well, okay. Thanks. This Friday?”

“This Friday. We leave after fajr and try to get back before dhuhr. I have to help cook. Can you take a taxi to my place?”

Taxi. This is another opportunity, but I shrink back and don’t tell her about the incident. I’ll tell her later. Maybe in the desert it will seem less weird.

* * *

 

Tuesday, and I call my mother, who has heard about the tests. She went with Rahim and Abdo to the doctor. He does have leukemia.

I talk to Abdo on the phone, and five seconds in I can’t talk because I’m crying. He hangs onto the phone silently for a while and then gives it back to my mother, who tells me to have faith in Allah that he will be okay.

I want to go home, or to bring Abdo here where there are better doctors, but my work visa is only for me, it will not allow my child or still-husband to enter the country. I can’t leave until my week vacation in January, and I have two years left on my contract. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go to work tomorrow and write stupid untrue stories when my son is dying, and I don’t know how I’m going to pay for his treatment even if I go to work.

I want to walk but it’s after dark and the gates are locked. I pick the unicorn book up off the pile of stuff and open it.

Fantasy isn’t really my thing. We don’t get many English fantasy books here, but this one is pretty standard to what I know of the genre. There’s a magical horse with a single horn, and a failed magician, and a fallen woman, and a few successful magicians. A king and a chosen one. I really only keep reading because it is something to do, and because of no-nonsense, forthright Molly Grue.

But I know how this story goes. There will be a solution, because there is always a solution in fantasy. You can find your people, if you are brave. You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it. There will be a happy ending. Hope is bitter to me right now. There is no solution to my father’s death which led to my unfinished degree and marriage and then my terrible boring job, no solution to the labour and immigration laws or the economy in my country and this one. No solution to Abdo’s leukemia or my mother’s diabetes and heart palpitations. It does not matter what I do or how hard I try.

* * *

 

I had thought that cutting my wrist would be a relief. It is, the moment the blood starts to gush, but then it hurts, and I can’t make the blood stop, and I have made a terrible mistake. I tie my wrist up with a tightly knotted handkerchief, but still it bleeds, and I am dizzy.

I pound on the door of the guard’s room until he emerges and I tell him I need to go to the hospital. I cut myself while cooking. Yes on the wrist, shut up and let me out. He does.

I am walking into the desert again. Blood drips down my fingers and I am as light-headed and fuzzy as I was when I was dying of the heat, and I’m confused because I’m dying but I’m not hot this time. I stumble towards what I think is the wadi, marked by palm trees rising out of the desert, dark grey on black picked out in silver with moonlight. I am not going to make it. I kneel, and lay down on the rocky ground.

There are headlights in the distance. One, two, three. Whoosh, whoosh. It’s the road. It’s not him. He’s not coming.

* * *

 

I open my eyes, and I am dead. I am laying on the backseat of the taxi and this is the afterlife. It was never real, I was just dreaming as I died.

“You very nearly died. I almost didn’t get here in time.” There is a worry in the driver’s voice.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I thought it would help but it was a mistake.” The smell of spoiled roses is all around and the car is blissfully cold. I don’t have an AC at home.

“I don’t want you to be sorry, I want you to live. That’s why I saved you. I want you to live until you die. Live out the natural span of your life. ‘I was merciful to you, be merciful to yourselves. Don’t kill yourselves,’” they recite. I start to cry. It seems like all I do these days.

They put the car in gear and we drive, bumping over rocks and ridges of sand.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital. I can’t afford it.” I need the money for Abdo’s hospital stay. Oh, what have I done.

“How do you feel about coffee?”

I don’t feel much of anything. “I can afford coffee,” I joke weakly. I peel back the rose-scented gauze on my wrist.

“Your handkerchief was a loss,” they say.

“Who did this? Did you do this?” My wrist has been neatly stitched up.

“Yes. I learned how to suture early on in the job. Medicine has come a long way, I gather, but I don’t know enough about it to do much more than suture and fling zamzam water at people and drive for the hospital.” We are silent for a while. “They have pills now that will make you stop wanting to kill yourself. Consider them. Strongly. You are fortunate now that you don’t have to live like this.”

I start to cry again. Goddamnit.

* * *

 

I manage not to cry at coffee, thank God. We are parked outside a roadside coffee stand, lit up with strings of Christmas lights. The radio inside the shop blares Quran, but it’s only just audible over the whirring air conditioner inside the car, with the windows closed.

“Did you read the book?” They ask. We are sitting in the front seats waiting for the boy to bring our coffee to the car. There are black crystals and pink lace on the sleeve of the driver’s garment, and their face is smooth.

“You’re a woman today,” I blurt, woozy with blood loss and coffee even though I chugged a bottle of water.

“I’m not a woman, I’m me,” they say. “Sometimes I like lace. Sometimes I don’t. You didn’t read the book?”

“I read some of it. I just don’t really like English fantasy stories that much.”

“Stick with it. It’s older but it’s not typical fantasy. You may be surprised.” There is a Hindi magazine on the dashboard this time, and on the cover of the magazine a perfectly smooth-skinned model dressed in golden brocade. “See how it ends, and then see how the next book ends. It’s gotten me through some years.” We sip coffee.

“The first law of living,” they say, “is that you keep living. You do it every day for eighty years, and then you can be done. It’s like a job, or like writing. You don’t like writing and you drag your feet about it because it’s hard and you want to go have tea and a biscuit instead, but you do it. You’ve been given this job, and so you do it. And then when you're done you can relax and have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve completed your work for the day.” They switch to English: “Your true task is just beginning, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail.”   I suspect they’re quoting from the book, from a passage that I haven’t gotten to yet. “Neither magic nor murder will help you now,” they continue. “You must fight.” They switch back to Arabic: “Fight, and live. I can’t save you. Only you can do that.”

“I know,” I say. “But it’s hard, and I don’t have any desire to. I’m sorry, I’ve wasted your time twice.”

“You got the chance to live a little longer, so it was not a waste. That’s the best I can ever do for anyone. But take the chance, this time.”

“I will try.”

They gulp down the rest of their coffee and put their car into gear. “Ah, there’s another one. You’re going to have to come with me this time. Buckle your seatbelt and hold on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've translated the folktale "Toboqa is right for Shin." The original version can be found on my blog here (http://brassmanticore.tumblr.com/post/90042856669/oddeyesight-brought-to-my-attention-that-the-omani) and a modern Omani version here (http://brassmanticore.tumblr.com/post/89863313194/the-smart-youth-and-the-smarter-girl).


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